Sticks and Stones

It bothers Americans when we're told how unpopular we
are with the rest of the world. For some of us, at
least, it gets our back up -- and our natural tendency
is to tell the French, for example, that we'd rather
not hear from them until the day when they need us to
bail them out again.

But we cool off. We're big boys and girls, after all,
and we don't really bruise that easily. We're also
hopeful that, eventually, our ostrich-headed allies
will realize there's a World War going on out there
and they need to pick a side -- the choice being
between the forces of civilization and the forces of
anarchy. Considering the fact that the latter team is
growing stronger and bolder daily, while most of our
European Union friends continue to dismantle their
defenses, that day may not be too long in coming.

In the meantime, let's be realistic about the world we
live in. Mexican leaders apparently have an economic
policy based on exporting their own citizens, while
complaining about US immigration policies that are far
less exclusionary than their own. The French jail
perfectly nice people for politically incorrect
comments, but scold us for holding terrorists at
Guantanamo.

Russia, though, takes the cake. Here is a government
apparently run by ex-KGB agents who have no problem
blackmailing whole countries by turning the crank on
their oil pipelines. They're not doing anything shady,
they say. They can’t help it if their opponents are
so notoriously accident-prone. Criticize these guys
and you might accidentally drink a cup of tea laced
with a few million dollars worth of deadly, and
extremely rare, radioactive poison. Oppose the Russian
leadership, and you could trip and fall off a tall
building or stumble into the path of a bullet.

The hundreds of demonstrators the Kremlin has had
beaten and arrested in the last few weeks alone, we
are told, were not pro-democracy activists but common
criminals -- like world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
Demonstrating without a permit is a serious crime and,
luckily for the Kremlin, it turns out that
pro-government youth groups seem always to have
permits for rallies at the exact times and places that
anti-government protesters gather.

Another group that seems to be having trouble with
permits is the media. Newspapers and television
stations that aren't smart enough to know that America
is the enemy and that things are great in Russia can't
seem to get their paperwork in order. It’s some sort
of IQ test, I guess.

President Vladimir Putin, though, shows no sign that
he feels defensive about his remarkable string of
luck. He knows who's really to blame for "meddling" in
Russian "internal affairs." It's the United States.